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To me, [college campuses] are electrically charged with new ideas, intimate tracking and understanding of political stuff, and a good view of where we're going as a nation. Ideas are hatched there, and then society picks them up over time. And finally, I have often, very often considered teaching college. And I'm thinking of that more lately.
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I submit college campuses are the last place in the world to go to for fresh ideas about anything involving our civic health, or to get a view of where we are going as a nation (except perhaps perversly, that is, how far in the direction of increasingly narrow and inferior higher education a nation can go). I submit they have become intellectually stultified laboratories of liberalism intended to to produce amoral and joyless young people who don’t like their country. If I had a kid of college age I would do my best to convince him or her that a year or two around the world on a merchant freighter would be a far healthier and edifying experience.
I agree that there is a strong streak of anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism in America. I think this is because we see ourselves first as a nation of down-to-earth doers. The kind of intellect we admire is geared toward the practical and inventive, and dedicated to achievement and our physical and moral betterment. Likewise, the more popular American philosophy has seemed dedicated to the end of a better life, to self-improvement, and is written in clear, compelling and uplifting style. We’ve never shown a lot of patience for intellectuality that either doesn’t have a moral purpose or that makes us feel bad. Obviously these are generalizations. But still I think they hold basic truths about the American character still in play today. The distrust of flowery talkers and fancy philosophizers may go back to our roots. The early Americans struggled to fight off an authoritarian colonizing power which used fancy language as a tool to subjugate them. They had to develop a clearer language to articulate their grievances and inspire a people to revolution. One could say the American Revolution was as much about the triumph of clear and meaningful language as it was about the triumph of the human spirit – or that the two were (and are) very much intertwined.
By contrast, a lot of intellectualism today is “sophisticated” – that is, it is obscure, condescending, demoralizing and contains an implicit critique of the entire American ideal of optimism and eternal self-improvement. It is post-modern – that is, it assumes human limitation and helplessness in the face of ovewhelming fates and forces. It seeks to reduce man. It ridicules simplemindness and optimism. It rejects enduring standards of morality and purposeful national identity.